As of Fall, 2003, Peter M. Shane will be the Joseph S. Pratt-Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur Professor of Law, as well as the Director of the Center for Law, Social Science, and Public Policy at the Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law. He will also be Distinguished Service Professor (Adjunct) of Law and Public Policy at the H. J. Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University and chair of the Advisory Board of Carnegie Mellon's Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society (InSITeS). Professor Shane was the founding Director of InSITeS from its inception in April, 2001 until the summer of 2003. His academic work is concentrated in two large areas, U.S. constitutional and administrative law and the law and social impacts of cyberspace.

Constitutional and Administrative Law
Professor Shane has been a teacher of constitutional and administrative law since 1981. His specialties include separation of powers law and the application of law to the presidency, as well as telecommunications law. A former Justice Department lawyer and assistant general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget, he is co author of the first (and only) law school casebook on separation of powers law, P. SHANE AND H. BRUFF, SEPARATION OF POWERS LAW: CASES AND MATERIALS, published in 1996 by Carolina Academic Press, and which is expected to be published in a new edition in 2004. (The first edition, published in 1988, was entitled P. SHANE & H. BRUFF, THE LAW OF PRESIDENTIAL POWER: CASES AND MATERIALS.) His long bibliography of law review articles includes writings on executive privilege, judicial impeachment, and the constitutionality of independent counsels. He is co author also of J. MASHAW, R. MERRILL, & P. SHANE, ADMINISTRATIVE LAW: THE AMERICAN PUBLIC LAW SYSTEM (West Group, 5th ed. 2003). Professor Shane is also frequent commentator and consultant to public bodies on separation of powers issues, and was appointed a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States in 1995. He has served on the Council of the ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice and has chaired the Section on Administrative Law of the Association of American Law Schools. His op-eds on constitutional issues have appeared in numerous newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Social Impacts of Information Technology
Beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s, Professor Shane became interested in the possible democratic potential of the Internet. His involvement in issues of electronic democracy deepened after spending the 1999-2000 academic year as a contributing editor for IntellectualCapital.Com, an online public policy journal for which he wrote a monthly column on law and politics. That experience led him to conceive of a research-and-public-outreach project on the Internet and civic engagement that, with the help of friends and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, was founded as the Community Connections program in fall,2000 at the H. J. Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. Financial support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation enabled Professor Shane and his political science collaborator, Peter Muhlberger, to launch the Community Connections web site in 2001.

With the founding of InSITeS in April, 2001, Professors Shane and Muhlberger were able to nurture their program in "e-governance and civic engagement" to maturity, leading, in the fall of 2002, to a three-year National Science Foundation grant to develop and test software for on-line citizen deliberation regarding public policy issues. Professors Shane and Muhlberger were joined on this grant by a third colleague, Professor Robert Cavalier, director of the Multi-Media Lab of the Philosophy Department's Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics, who is the team's key researcher on matters of design and issue representation.

Professor Shane has also been instrumental in launching research and teaching initiatives on cybersecurity policy, privacy and public information policy, and the use of information technology to facilitate social and economic development. Much of his current writing and research activity is in the area of "electronic democracy," including on-line deliberation, electronic rulemaking, and public information policy.

Other Activities
From 1994 to 1998, Professor Shane served as dean at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, having previously taught for 13 years at the University of Iowa College of Law. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Duke, Boston College, and Villanova Law Schools. In December, 2001, he became the inaugural holder of the "foreign chair" for the University of Ghent LL.M. program on the law of Europe in comparative perspective. He has chaired the Section on Remedies of the Association of American Law Schools and was co-founder of the AALS Section for the Law School Dean.

Following a national survey, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, published by the American Association for Higher Education, highlighted Professor Shane in January February 1998 as one of 40 "Young Leaders of the Academy" - the only law dean on the list. Upon stepping down as Pitt's law dean in June, 1998, Professor Shane was honored by a citation from the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania commending him for "outstanding contributions" and "outstanding ability, dedication, and integrity." He was elected in 1998 to the American Law Institute.

Among his "extracurricular activities," Professor Shane is proudest of his service to the national board of CLEO - the Council on Legal Educational Opportunity - for which he chairs the Program Committee.